SWIFT recently shared the successful test results of its new instant cross-border payments proof of concept. This news follows on the heels of their previous announcement of launching a sandbox which allows fintech players to test on Australia’s New Payments Platform network.

All the payments sent during the trial were processed end-to-end within 60 seconds.

This test involves banks in China, Singapore, Thailand and of course, Australia.

The debut of Australia’s domestic instant payment system, the New Payments Platform (NPP), enabled SWIFT and the group of banks, to study the feasibility of enabling the gpi service in NPP and review how this would enable these cross-border payments to be sped up.

What the trial sought to establish was whether, by integrating and enabling the service into a domestic instant payment system, the gpi experience could be extended deeper into domestic markets, to end beneficiaries’ accounts, even outside normal business hours.

The trials has shown that the fastest test payments from Singapore and Thailand credited to Australian end beneficiaries via NPP within 30 seconds.

The NPP also enabled for all payments within this trial to completed end to end within 60 seconds which is a far cry from the typical experience of cross-border payments which could take up to days.

Mr. Eddie Haddad, Managing Director of SWIFT, Asia Pacific, said:

“These results demonstrate two important prerequisites necessary to realise an instant cross-border payment service in the region. First, we are able to extend the window for processing cross-border payments outside traditional business hours.

Second, by linking cross-border SWIFT gpi payments with domestic real-time payment systems, we are able to achieve faster cross-border payments amongst a larger number of institutions. The linkage was achieved by participant banks like National Australia Bank processing incoming SWIFT gpi payments onward as NPP instant payments.”

Will all payments in real-time in the near future?

Sadly no, when there are multiple banks involved in the payment chain, and the final leg needs to be cleared within the recipient country, the domestic payments are sometimes delayed owing to the limited operating hours of the local clearing systems.